Serving up a flight of reviews for your reading pleasure. Prepare to knock back tastes of gritty novellas, a refined spy thriller, a complex memoir, and family fiction with both sweet and sour notes. Cheers!
Owning Up by George Pelecanos (2024)
What’s better than a new George Pelecanos novel? Four new Pelecanos novellas! Quality and quantity, win-win.
George Pelecanos has been one of my favorite authors since I read Nick’s Trip in the early 90s, so it’s no surprise that I loved this collection. As with most of his other work these novellas are all set in Washington, D.C., but this is the District of the working class, no politicians or government workers in sight. The plots are unique with common denominators including cops, crimes, and aftermaths.
The characters this man creates… it’s hard to explain why portraits of small-time criminals, losers and strivers resonate so. Must be because of his staggering talent. Pelecanos sees things not just on the surface, but underneath, in words never spoken. He finds the gentleness in people, and the wonder that survives inside hard shells.
If you’ve never read Pelecanos, Owning Up a good place to start. His authenticity is an antidote to a world that grows more fake by the day.
…they look at the fieldstone mansion that sits on a slight rise like a giant tombstone, a house that surely must be haunted by the ghosts of the dead.
The Collector by Daniel Silva (2023)
This is book number 23 in Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series. It was the first one for me and I’m looking forward to more. The only question is will I go back to the beginning or in a twist, continue reading in reverse order?
Silva’s writing is elegant with a touch of menace. He brings spy craft, the art world and Russian politics together in a novel packed with daring robberies, car chases and gunfights. Gabriel Allon is the former head of the Israeli Mossad and employs a dark Jewish humor. He’s retired, living in Italy with his wife and children, and working as an art restorer. But he can’t seem to escape his old world.
Silva is good at creating delightfully memorable characters like Ingrid Johansen, the thief with a peculiar sense of morality and Italian Art Squad General Cesare Ferrari. All their conversations are sharp and sophisticated, playful and knowing. Think European jet-setters, leisurely Venetian lunches where the wine flows, and deadly engagements.
The Collector is an antidote to fluffy, mainstream thrillers. It respects the reader’s intelligence with a smart mix of current events and pure fiction. It may be 23rd in the series but it definitely works on its own.
(Gabriel) rammed a fresh 15-round magazine into the Beretta. “Which quadrant of the index card would you like me to hit?”
“How about all four?”
Gabriel’s arm swung up, and four shots rang out.
“My god,” whispered Ingrid… “That was…”
“A parlor trick,” he said, cutting her off.
The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger (2017)
The Choice is part memoir / part self-help guide. Eger tells the story of her time as a prisoner in Auschwitz, her eventual liberation, and her life after. She became a clinical psychologist in her 40s and is world-renowned for her ability to help people break free of their mental prisons.
Eger was 16 years old in 1944, living with her family in Hungary. While the signs of war and Nazism had been everywhere – the yellow stars, the soldiers – she and her family were safe together.
It didn’t last. All the Jews were rounded up and put on a train to the notorious concentration camp. In a terrible instant Dr. Josef Mengele, who was supervising the sorting of the new prisoners, asked her ‘is she your mother or your sister?’ Young Eva answered instantly and honestly: “Mother,” and that was that. Mengele pointed Eva’s mother to the left, sending her to the gas chamber where she was murdered the same day.
Eger is an incredible writer: emotional, frank, and stoic. Her powers of observation and description astound, and her stories will move you. But it wasn’t her harrowing tales of survival that caused me to tear up as I read, it was the wisdom that she applied to herself and to her patients. She has so much to offer humanity in terms of a way out of the prisons of our minds.
The Choice is hopeful. Clearly she survived and eventually thrived, and we can, too.
Read this to bear witness, yes, but also to heal. This book is an antidote to suffering and it offers her signature philosophy, that we have a CHOICE when we embrace Compassion, Humor, Optimism, Intuition, Curiosity and Self-Expression.
This quote is from the time when Eger traveled back to Vienna, her first time since the war, and she was looking at the ditches on the side of the road as they drove past:
I imagine them as I once saw them, spilling over with corpses, but I can also see them as they are now, filling up with summer grass. I can see that the past doesn’t taint the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past. Time is the medium. Time is the track, we travel it.
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty (2021)
Liane Moriarty is one of my favorites for a few reasons. First, she just gets people, especially women. She has a wickedly sharp sense of humor and an ability to create stories that anyone can relate to, even if we haven’t experienced the situation ourselves.
Apples Never Fall begins with a disappearance. Joy Delaney’s four grown children and husband are starting to get worried about their mother / wife. And they can’t help thinking about the recent houseguest of Joy and Stan’s, the strange Savannah… was she involved?
Each chapter changes perspective and we learn about the Delaneys, the good looking tennis couple, recently retired from their joint career as owners of a successful coaching business. They’re a close-knit family, but each has their issues like Stan and his unfulfilled championship goal and Joy and her undervalued talent. But they love each other and would never hurt each other, right?
Savannah’s story slowly emerges as the novel progresses. She’s likeable and slightly off, but toward the end there’s a glimpse of the extent of her crazy. I bet Moriarty enjoyed writing Savannah’s backstory. She’s created a character who can horrify and provoke sympathy at the same time.
Bottom line: I loved it, loved the ending, loved Moriarty’s way with words. She’s actually a bit of a philosopher and there are multiple moments of transcendent wisdom in this book, including a frustrated diatribe about sexism and resentment reminiscent of the celebrated Barbie movie rant.
This book is an antidote for complaints about life – dip into the Delaney clan’s story for a while and emerge from the rollercoaster both entertained and a little bit wiser.
,,, (Joy’s hairdresser) would say, here is one possible motive and here is another. Because any marriage of that many years has multiple motives for murder. Every police officer and hairdresser knows that.
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